There’s an old story, about how if you put a frog in boiling water, it will hop out but if you put it in cool water, slowly raise the temperature it will stay in the water and eventually die. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I get the concept because when my electric shaver blades get dull, I don’t notice it until they’re really dull. The change from day-to-day, week-to-week is so small it’s not noticeable.
The same thing in business, old practices (habits) are hard to change. Take the company that manually entered about 400 transactions into an online portal for payment. The new owner found a $50 a month software package that did all of them at once, using information already in the system.
Or what about the companies still writing and mailing checks when most vendors make it easy to pay online (and many take credit cards). One client manages credit card payments to get an extra 45 days of working capital, plus the points or cash-back.
It’s why I say new owners of a business are often “A Breath of Fresh Air” and it’s not just culture. They often are more in-tune with technology and employees love it when they have tools to be more productive. Heck, many years ago a client doubled his (newly owned) business in two years and he said the main driver was an online ordering system to book jobs versus phone calls (and phone tag).
A good idea is to look around your business and notice all the things you’re doing the same way you’ve done them “forever.” I’ll bet there are some tools out there to make mundane processes less burdensome.
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” (Philosopher) Bertrand Russell